Today I wanted to address an issue regarding Blizzard's response to us and the EU forums as a whole. It's been a long while since anything regarding reasonable customer response has been met by Blizzard on this platform and the aim of the thread is to get a response regarding my concerns (and hopefully yours) from Blizzard.

This comes from us posting issues in the hopes Blizzard look at them such, bugs that are causing issues, suggestions to improve quality of life such as the recent march for X-faction communication and they've been disregarded in favour of different platforms. Now the forums aren't perfect, but when issues such as Sharding come up, it's at least comforting to have a response from Blizzard that they are looking at it and have the response on the forums we use. After all, these forums are intended as a place of discussion and feedback.

But therein lies the issue, Blizzard are not using the EU forums. It seems they are ignoring them in favour of the NA realms and Reddit as a platform, but for people that do not use Reddit or the NA forums, they're out of luck.

That's unfair to the EU player-base and I'd like to see a change in Blizzard's response. We should not be forced to resort to NA or a third-party site to get information when they have their own platform for it.

I'm currently aiming for a response with some information about where the best place would be to voice our concerns, if it isn't here. A lot of time and energy could be saved if we simply knew the best way to reach them.

I know this may not matter to everyone but I believe it is an issue. If you have a way to spread this message, I urge you to do so. One half of the playerbase is being ignored and that is not okay.

To echo the information we received during with during our out of office hours, which Ornyx already posted:

Over the last couple of years, we've begun using some new technology we've occasionally referred to as "sharding" in non-instanced zones, which separates players in high-traffic areas out into separate "shards" of a particular zone. The benefit to our server performance has been massive - it was a huge part of why Legion's launch went so smoothly - and so, as a whole, we've been very happy with the system.

The one exception has been on RP realms, where player-run events are much more common. On RP realms, we believe that the overall loss to game performance is worth it in order to support those events. If players on RP realms choose to organize an event and congregate somewhere, and have a laggy experience as a result, that's their choice, and we'd like to allow them as much freedom to do so as possible.

So, we've recently applied a hotfix that should disable realm sharding in the vast majority of the outdoor world on RP realms. That includes Kalimdor, the Eastern Kingdoms, Northrend, Pandaria, Outland, Draenor, and all related sub-zones. This has actually been our intention for some time now, but as part of investigating some reports involving a player-run event in Northrend, we discovered some secondary issues that were causing it not to function properly.

There are still limits, of course; we don't want playing on an RP realm to mean you can't properly experience core game content due to low FPS or heavy input lag. As such, all Legion zones (including all of the Broken Isles, the Broken Isles version of Dalaran, and soon, Argus) will still have sharding active, as they do on non-RP realms. Similarly, when the game itself points players toward a specific area of the non-Legion world (such as for a holiday event or new patch content), we may temporarily re-enable sharding in that area until things settle down.

In general, however, our goal is to follow the general rule of thumb that RP realms do not shard, except in current-expansion zones, or when temporarily necessary to support gameplay. This should now be the case on all RP and RP-PvP realms worldwide. This is in addition to our existing rule that RP realms do not automatically fill areas using our Cross-Realm Zones system (although you can still enter an RP realm using CRZ if you're grouped with a player on an RP realm).

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I'm sorry that your event on Argent Dawn was overlooked. In the future, if you are hosting a very large roleplaying event that is being impacted by sharding (which, given the above changes, shouldn't happen very often anymore) I'd encourage you to bring it to the Community Team's attention by dropping an e-mail to [email protected] with the details of the event.

In regards to the EU forums being ignored, I can accept that there's room for improvement but at the same time I think we have also come a long way over the past year or so.

In most cases Lore and Kaivax now mirror information onto the EU forum as soon as it gets posted on the NA forums rather than there being a delay of several hours. Yes, sometimes things fall the cracks or get missed and ideally we want to avoid this.

More recently (since Legion), the EU forums have had developers contributing in the Class Development forum and Watcher (Ion) has also posted several times on the EU forums in topics that were of interest to EU players but not necessarily to NA players.

When it comes to feedback, it isn't considered in a vacuum. We compile feedback from all the game regions (both EU and NA as well as ANZ, China etc.), this includes what players are saying on social media, fan sites, other forums, YouTube videos etc. We will drill down deeper if one region is resonating with something far more than others, to understand why that is the case and what (if any) action is appropriate.

There is also a 9 hour time difference between France (where the EU Community team is based) and California (where the developers are based). When we are in the office, the majority of the staff across the ocean are asleep or going to sleep. This means we don't have immediate access to get answers or information, so we send any requests or relevant details via email. More often than not, the feedback being raised by the EU player-base isn't that dissimilar to what is being raised by the NA player-base, so such matters become topics of discussion during office hours in California, this is often why information comes out during that time rather than during EU hours. Though there have been cases where information has been posted first on EU, which has lead to similar complaints from NA players about being ignored.

The information that we receive and post, in most cases, is a direct result of feedback relaying on a global level, not because one forum is preferred more than the other.

At the end of the day, our priority is to get any information we receive out into the community, it's not really a considered a problem whether that happens to be on the NA forum first, the EU forum first, or another platform entirely if it's more appropriate for the audience in question.

Sorry, did you just copy/paste a response from a Dev post on US forums in response to a complaint that Devs never respond to posts on EU forums? Did someone dare you for a laugh?

Yes I did, because it was information we received during the night that we were asked to share globally. Considering part of this thread was about the RP event in Europe that got missed I felt like it was the best place to put that information as it pertained specifically to the sharding topic. That being said, Community Managers aren't Developers.